This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

What’s a Kate Bush concert worth? Thousands of kilometres (and dollars) later, I have an answer

Spoiler alert: If you plan on attending one of Kate Bush’s shows between now and Oct. 1 and wish to remain blissfully unaware, read no further.

LONDON—If you were to get close enough to lean over the foot of the stage at the Eventim Apollo theatre before Kate Bush takes ownership of it, here’s what you would see:

Fluorescent, green dots. Lots of them, maybe a foot apart, strung across the perimeter, presumably to prevent her from venturing over the edge, though venturing over the edge turns out to be what these shows — 22 nights’ worth, one more than the Beatles spent there in 1964-65, back when the venue was known as the Hammersmith Odeon — are all about.

It’s the kind of obsessive detail you tend to fixate on if you’ve travelled thousands of kilometres (5,731, if you believe the most popular distance calculators) and burned through an almost equal number of dollars just to attend a concert, even when it’s by an artist who, until this sold-out, five-week run, hadn’t performed a show since 1979.

It’s also a pre-emptive strike of sorts. In a request so solicitous it bordered on supplication, Bush had informed concertgoers, “It would mean a great deal to me if you would please refrain from taking photos or filming during the shows.”

Since none of us was about to risk being unceremoniously tossed from a concert we’d waited 35 years to see, we spend the hour or so between our entry and Bush’s injudiciously taking photos of everything in sight, from the bathed-in-blue stage to little green dots to the water bottles lined up under the keyboards (two with red caps for Bush) and, eventually, each other.

The show starts at 7:45 on the nose and before we know it, Bush is striding into view, leading four background singers, one of whom is her 16-year-old son, Bertie, and she’s belting out the opening lines to “Lily,” and the voice we all know so well but secretly feared she’d be unable to summon onstage comes roaring out. The sound of it is mighty. “Well I said, ‘Lily, oh Lily, I don’t feel safe/I feel that life has blown a great big hole through me’ . . .”

In the three hours to follow, it’ll be one of only three songs not taken from either Hounds of Love or Aerial. At this point, people around me are actually crying. It’s possible I am one of them.

YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN...

Being the kind of compulsive listener who not only researches the set list but compiles it into a playlist to be absorbed for weeks in advance, part of me is already mourning the fact that there’ll be no “Wuthering Heights” or “Babooshka” or “This Woman’s Work” to come.

But then an odd thing happens. By the time Bush executes the one-two punch of “Running Up That Hill (Deal With God)” and “King of the Mountain” — the latter a late-period single that was a hit in the U.K. and Canada and nowhere else — it’s clear that watching her run through the hits for a couple of hours would have virtually guaranteed diminishing returns.

Put simply, at 56, Bush doesn’t move around a great deal onstage these days, so there’s not much to look at, at least not until percussionist Mino Cinelu moves to centre stage and commences wildly spinning a bullroarer — a.k.a. that wood-on-a-string thing used to make a “bush telephone call” in Crocodile Dundee II — above his head and pretty soon the music sounds like the whirring of helicopter blades.

By the time the noise shifts into “And Dream of Sheep,” the opening movement of “The Ninth Wave,” the first of the two extended pieces that comprise the bulk of the show, the evening’s structure begins to make sense.

It’s no longer a concert, it’s theatre, a notion cemented at evening’s end when Bush thanks “the cast.”

Some of this divide is explicit, such as when air cannons fire thousands of pieces of paper, each containing an excerpt from the Tennyson poem “The Coming of Arthur,” raining down on the crowd. During the interval, our aisle is flooded with people who’ve come down from the balcony, scrambling on hands and knees to gather up the souvenirs, some of them tucking them fastidiously into the envelopes their tickets came in.

For the record, here’s what is written on each slip: “Wave after wave, each mightier than the last/Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep/And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged/Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame.”

YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN...

As for “The Ninth Wave,” what was originally an abstruse tale of a woman who has fallen overboard and is trying to stay alive becomes an expansive exploration of rebirth. Yes, this is the kind of grand notion that actually runs through your head while you’re watching film of Bush floating in a 20-foot tank, wearing a life-jacket, singing — not lip-synching — while she’s doing so. (As I find out later by reading the $27 program, she came down with mild hypothermia for her efforts.)

In the end, the single image that will stay with me was an accidental one. The show’s climax features a giant birch tree hurtling down from the ceiling and smashing through the back of Bush’s black piano. As she begins her encore, a single white feather drifts down from one of the branches and lands on the edge of the piano — and we mean right on the edge — where it flutters while Bush, eyes shut, performs the show’s newest song, 2011’s “Among Angels,” solo.

So, was it all worth it? Or, more to the point, what was it worth?

Get more of the Star in your inbox

Never miss the latest news from the Star. Sign up for our newsletters to get today's top stories, your favourite columnists and lots more in your inbox

More Entertainment

Top Stories

More from The Star & Partners

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com